As World of Warcraft: Forever‘s release next week approaches, fans have combed through a brand new launch trailer and found what they think is an easter egg signifying something massive: a potential return to the beloved continent of Northrend that was featured in WoW‘s Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
The easter egg is in this trailer, which came out earlier this week to celebrate the launch with a sick animation set to…oh my god is that Amy Lee in “End of You”? Oh, hell yes.
You want to watch at around the 3:00 minute mark, where it shows a zoomed-out version of Azeroth with lots of blue and red lights coming from continents to the left- and right-hand sides. Those continents are, of course, Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, the two continents we’ll be exploring when Forever launches. In the middle is a big, cloudy mass: that’s the Maelstrom. No one’s in there, it’s a dang Maelstrom.
But what’s that to the north?
As pointed out by Whatdididotho1 on Reddit, there are, faintly visible, some glowing red and blue lights on top of the map on a landmass to the north. That’s Northrend, the icy northern continent originally depicted in Warcraft 3 and, later, given an entire WoW expansion to shine in Wrath of the Lich King, which is largely regarded as one of the game’s best expansions even years later. Why would there be little lights up there if not to indicate that players might be up there? There’s no way this is some sort of silly oversight.
Blizzard itself isn’t denying the possibility, and in fact seems to encourage the speculation. In a recent interview with IGN, principal game designer Kris Zierhut confirmed that “Northrend exists” in Forever, as do Pandaria and the Dark Portal, as all these locations had been canonized at the time that World of Warcraft first came out. However, Zierhut also says that this game is intended to focus on Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. There will be no new capital cities: you’ll always return “home,” with Forever being about drilling into those continents in greater detail rather than spreading out into more and more areas.
Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally visit. Perhaps for a dungeon? Or, as lead Classic designer Tim Jones suggests, a “hostile” max-level zone:
I think our attitude is [that] we are in a kind of a time bubble, right? We’re locked in the place in between the end of Warcraft 3 and before Burning Crusade. And everything about Azeroth existed, even Outland exists, even Northrend exists, like Quel’Thelas exists. All these places are there. And I don’t think if we ever went to Northrend, we wouldn’t be visiting the version that you see in Wrath of the Lich King, but could we visit some extremely hostile level 60 version of it because Arthas is still in the stage where he’s sending Kel’Thuzad to Eastern Kingdoms to assault Eastern Plaguelands? We could. There’s so much that we can do with the timeline that we’re in.
Whatever’s going on in Northrend, we’re not going to see it at launch, but given all these hints I feel like it’s coming imminently, and we’ll start to see breadcrumb hints as we play through the endgame content that hasn’t been seen yet. Personally, I’m glad WoW: Forever isn’t going to keep hopping continents every few years until it abandons its old world altogether. But good as it is to be able to return home, it’s still fun to occasionally poke our nose outside and see what’s going on further afield. Even if it’s a bit chilly out there.
